This comes from a group chat.
okay guys
and ladies, of course
so I’ve been doing this thing called lifelogging
basically the idea is to collect as much data about your life as you can to optimize it and create a record and such
using version control software is doing it, because you’re tracking how a file changed over time
you’re recording an aspect of yourself at those moments in time
all stuff is like this
it comes back to being able to rebuild someone’s personality from the data about their life that’s left behind
even writing this right now; I know in principle it could be collected and put into a machine awareness so it could think like me, sorta
the way I express ideas, the letter frequencies, the vocabulary used
for instance
(and I can’t remember specifically where I heard this [I think it was on a futurism podcast with john smart] so attune your bayesian probability filters, ‘kay?)
you can use a computer program and take a bunch of a person’s writings and compare it to an anonymous book and see the likelihood that they wrote it
which obviously makes sense that that’d probably be possible to do
but what’s crazy is that we have that technology now
I think they used it for jk rowling to tell another book that she published under a pen name
(she wrote harry potter IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING)
(crazy to think she just sat down and _wrote_)
my point being, keep in mind anything you publish on the Internet, even if you do so anonymously, is traceable to you
which I think is a good thing in the long-term, but in the near- and medium-term, keep that in mind. don’t publish what you aren’t willing to have your name attached to.
but the other way to look at that is with the lifelogging thing, ya know?
your mind is (essentially) equivalent to your memory.
if you can offload and digitize more of your memory you effectively have made your mind more powerful; you’ve expanded your mind, literally.
and also if we look at ourselves as mathematical algorithms
rather than the simplistic, naive, common view that all you are is a biological animal
then you can start to abstract from the animal, and preserve higher-order goodness, essentially, right?
you care about the things you write, but that’s several orders removed from the biological animal’s impulses
not that it’s not all one interconnected thing, but you can legitimately see yourself as a higher being than the animal
which you could call “spirit”
that’s why it’s kinda silly to me to talk with most atheists or whomever, because they really just plainly are uninformed of these completely mathematically sound definitions that use certain religious terms because they’re _helpful_.
if you see yourself _really_ as a spiritual being, a higher-order mathematical abstract algorithm
then your goal focuses more and more on preserving and increasing the fidelity of your memory, and gaining new experiences to put into memory
lolz, amirite?
well, I can’t tell you what _your_ goal is, but as I’ve thought of myself more and more as an abstract mathematical pattern it’s shifted from a short-sighted animalistic view to an infinite-sighted computational view
my goal has, that is
now I focus a lot on how to digitize my writings, how to record more about my life and how I think and act and create
but the most important takeaway from this, guys and ladies, is that you have to think about it from the point of view that in 15, 20, 25 years, every scrap of data that you are remotely trying to save will be able to be processed in microseconds by advanced super-2015-human artificial intelligences.
(ie, “2015-human” meaning that humans will continue to augment their minds, so you have to compare a machine intelligence to a specific year of the human-level intelligence)
so don’t worry necessarily about if your stuff is spread out on different media; focus on synthesizing new ideas and living a fun and interesting life.